Humanity in a nutshell - Just some thoughts #1

Recently I've been pondering why exactly we willfully hold ourselves back as a species. After all, we are all stuck on this rock until we find the means to set up camp somewhere else, right? So why do we stifle our society, dumb down our children, and hold back our sciences? To feel an inner contempt within ourselves? Well, that can't be right, as per the old saying 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down', and all of our outlooks on 'contemptuousness' are differing, as we are all different people. It is clear that we work together in some sort of hive-mind architecture to physically and mentally strain ourselves just enough so that old saying can bear true.

Remember when, as a kid, your parents used to tell you that you could be anything you wanted to be if you believed in yourself; that anything was possible if you could imagine it? Yet, as we get older, we find those words to be rather stifling than comforting. It brings up feelings of worthlessness and awkwardness, and as we look on those around us we find we would rather live a life of solitary, controlled, and compartmentalized annoyance, rather than living out our wildest dreams. We get 'hammered down' not by individual people, but by all the people you meet throughout your life together, as if their subconscious ideals were linked through time and space.

It is actually an amazing phenomena when observed. We tend to forget that, as we get older, we aren't like all the other animals that live on the planet. We feel less unique, but instilled from birth, we have a drive to branch out in order to complete ourselves. That confident line your parents always used to pull out when you felt down as a child just doesn't work anymore, because now we are older. I remember a baby cousin of mine always used to go off on how she wanted to be a princess when she got older, and my aunt always remarked that she is going to be sorely disappointed when she gets older. But I thought, does it have to be that way? She could be a princess if she wanted to. It isn't something that would naturally fall into her lap no doubt, and it would be one bumpy ride full of experiences, but isn't that what life is about? In my mind when she said she wanted to be a princess, rather than thinking 'Fat chance', I thought 'Good luck'. To me, it was more appropriate.

That brings me to something else -- the point of life. That golden question, "what is the point of my life?", is what separates us humans from all of the other biological organisms natural to this planet, at least in my opinion. One good answer is "To procreate", and this almost makes complete sense when looking at someone from a biological perspective. All of the things we do, we do to make our life better for our future family, we conform so that we have a better chance at finding a mate to pass on our genes. This answer stops working when you take homosexuality into the equation. Homosexuality is completely and wholly natural. So naturally, we aren't here solely for the purpose of procreation; if we were, nature would have it's fail-safes to prevent too much normal abnormalities (including homosexuality) from taking over the species, and from what I've seen, homosexuality does not hurt anyone.*


The best answer I've happened to come upon is that we forge our own meanings for our existence. Pondering on and off about what I would like to become of my life, I've found that, if you can imagine it, it can be done. Since we only know what life is like with the laws of the natural universe in place, it makes sense that our imagination is locked by what we know about the universe. We cannot imagine something that we cannot imagine, if that makes sense. For example, imagine a world where everyone was macaroni, and all of a sudden the gravity shuts off and all of the people float off the surface of the planet. Yes, it sounds, looks, and feels ridiculous, impractical, nonsensical, and downright impossible. But the fortunate (unfortunate for the macaroni-people) truth is that if you can imagine it, it can be done. That doesn't mean you will do it, but you can. You could have no arms, no legs, be paralyzed from the waist down. But if you can imagine that happening, then it is still a reality for you. Do I know how you would achieve something like that? Pffft hell no! I wouldn't know how to approach such a situation from any angle. But If I sat down, had a few hundred years to work out the sciences of it all, I could do it. It would take an immensely long time, yes, but I could do it. I would need an insane amount of materials, maybe even a means to create workers myself, but I. Could. Do it. And that is what separates us from the countless other organisms on this planet (that we know of) -- we humans have the potential to do what we put our minds to. Nothing is impossible for us, because we cannot imagine impossible. It is impossible for us to do so. Just as you cannot imagine what the 5th dimension would look like. Or the 6th. Or the 9th. Or the 219th. We can't, and we probably never will, but we can definitely imagine the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and (the scientific) 4th. And if you can imagine it, it can be done.

So, it's clear we are more than we let on, but still, my question stands. Why do we down ourselves and each other so persistently and detrimentally that we do none of these things? Where are the flying cars, the Mars mansions, the interstellar-highways, the castles made of candy and the- oh forget it. We have seen that our ancestors certainly did imagine. They imagined that we would one day return to the heavens, they built castles of gold, and imagined machines that would shoot arrows of lightning at their enemies. As a matter of fact it is widely debated about whether or not these machines actually existed or not. The first humans would probably have never even conceived homes that touch the clouds, or mechanical birds that could travel from one side of the planet to the other in a day and a half, or a "ship that sails on water that takes us to the moon" (not entirely accurate, at the risk of sounding poetic). But the things the DID imagine are feats of ingenuity that they were bent on achieving within their lifetime or their children's. Man has dreamed of reaching the moon since our very beginning, yet it took us over 5000 years to reach it, and people all over world still don't believe or even know that ever went. This is the question that stands out to me, and it is the only one that I want the answer to. What has caused us to forget that we are a great species? If you have kept reading up until now, I'd like your thoughts on the matter as well. Thank you for taking your time to read this.




*I call it a normal abnormality because it is generally accepted that from an evolutionary standpoint, homosexuality is recessive rather than superior, as the species would live if, of course, the males mated with the females, rather than with the other males, or females mating with other females. It happens naturally but it is abnormal as the majority of the species is heterosexual. That, and just saying abnormal would sound pretty rude.